Protesters Take Capitol by Phone

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Protesters Take Capitol by Phone

Capitol Hill's phone and fax lines were jammed most of Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors lodged their concerns with the Senate and Bush administration about the coming conflict in Iraq.

Described as the first "Virtual March" on Washington, anti-war protestors from around the country deluged the Senate and White House with a coordinated barrage of phone calls, faxes and e-mails.

The organizers, a coalition group called Win Without War, estimated that up to half a million people tried to communicate electronically with officials in Washington. A running total on the campaign's virtual HQ listed nearly 400,000 calls by 5 p.m. EST.

"We are overwhelmed by the reception we're getting," said Tom Andrews, Win Without War's national director. "I've just come back from the Capitol. The phones are very busy in every Senate office."

The idea, Andrews said, was to have the phone in every office ringing once a minute. He said the campaign had handily exceeded that goal.

For most of the day, calls put through to the Washington area were greeted with an "all circuits are busy" recorded message. Wired News was unable to connect with any Senate offices, despite numerous tries.

According to Reuters, calls placed to various senators received busy signals at all but two offices. A spokesman for Florida Democrat Bob Graham said his office had received 400 calls in the first three hours of the day, well above the norm. However, at Nebraska Republican Charles Hagel's office, a spokeswoman said the front desk did not seem to be any busier than usual.

Verizon, the area's largest local phone service provider, said the volume of calls was heavier than usual, but a spokesman declined to give numbers.

"The calling volumes are many more times than they normally would be," said spokesman Ells Edwards. He said Verizon didn't provide call volume statistics as a matter of policy, but declined to elaborate. Edwards insisted that persistent callers were eventually able to connect.

Win Without War claimed 500,000 protestors registered to participate at the campaign website. Many were assigned specific times to call. Chicago marketing executive Mary Rickard, for example, was supposed to call at 3:14 p.m., 3:19 p.m. and 3:24 p.m.

Besides phone calls, the coalition hoped that about 50,000 faxes would be delivered through TrueMajority, a grassroots advocacy project founded by Ben Cohen, co-founder of the Ben and Jerry's ice cream company. Using a Web interface, users were able to compose faxes to be sent by TrueMajority throughout the day.

The fax campaign is reminiscent of the United Kingdom's Fax Your MP project, an online service that makes it easy for U.K. citizens to communicate with their parliamentary representatives. Last year, the site was credited with forcing the British government to back down from a controversial proposal for national identity cards, after MPs were flooded with faxes from angry constituents.

Likewise, Win Without War's Andrews, a former Democratic representative from Maine, was optimistic that the Virtual March would prompt action on Capitol Hill.

"(The virtual march) indicates there are a significant number of people in every state, a cross section of people, who are organized," he said. "People take note of that in this town. There will be a significant impact in Washington."